Authors: Max Austin
“There’s a blue one in the garage we use for camping.”
“Go get it. I’m gonna pull my car around to your back door. We can put those guys in the trunk. A tarp’ll make it easier to move them.”
“Will they both fit in your trunk?”
“Maybe not,” Mick said. “Maybe we’ll wrap up the skinnier guy and put him in the backseat.”
“Dangerous way to go driving around.”
“My car’s burned anyway. I fired some shots at my place a little while ago. There were witnesses. They saw my car.”
Bud froze. “
Another
shootout?”
Mick nodded grimly. “These aren’t the only guys looking for us. There’s another guy, from Chicago, wears a suit and tie. He tried to run me over with his car, so I popped a few rounds at him. Don’t think I hit him, so he’s still out there. But his car’s shot up. He’ll have to change vehicles.”
“So do you.”
“You still got that license plate collection in your garage? I probably ought to switch plates before I drive anywhere.”
Bud nodded. “Where you gonna go?”
“West Mesa. Torch the car with these guys in it.”
“So you’ll need a ride back into town.”
“Feel like a drive?”
“Let me call Linda to come get the girls. Then we can do what needs to be done without worrying about them.”
Mick nodded and spun more paper towels off the dwindling roll.
Bud turned away, keeping an eye on the hall, making sure Amy wasn’t sneaking down to take a look. He speed-dialed Linda on his cell phone.
“Hi, hon,” he said when she answered. “I need you to come home. Right now.”
“Oh, my God. What’s happened?”
“Everybody’s okay. But we had a couple of, um, intruders here. Mick showed up and took care of them. But there’s clean-up work to be done.”
“Right in our house?”
“Sorry, no way around it. The girls were in the bathroom the whole time and didn’t see anything, but they’re pretty upset.”
“I’ll be there in ten minutes.”
“Thanks.” He paused. “I love you.”
Too late. She’d hung up.
Bud said over his shoulder to Mick. “We’ve got ten minutes.”
“Go get the tarp.”
While waiting for Albuquerque Police homicide detectives to arrive, the FBI agents conducted their own cursory search of Johnny Muller’s apartment.
“Find anything?” Pam asked as Hector came out of the bedroom.
“No. You?”
“Nothing that says, ‘I’m a bank robber.’ Usual bachelor pad. Posters thumbtacked to the walls, beer cans stacked on the counter.”
“I’m sure it was more like
House Beautiful
before it was turned upside down,” Hector said with a smirk.
“Get a load of the view out the front windows.”
He went over to the window and held a curtain out of the way. Sunlight sliced in, making his brown skin glow.
“An asphalt parking lot,” he said. “The street. A big empty prairie.”
“Where does that street go?”
“Ah. I see what you mean. Up into the foothills, where it dead-ends at the Tewa Casino.”
“Right. Which makes this a pretty good vantage point for watching armored cars.”
“It could give a fella ideas,” Hector said, jerking his head toward the dead man on the couch.
“Exactly what I was thinking.”
The APD detectives both had shaved heads, and they wore nylon windbreakers and jeans and sneakers. Their badges hung from chains around their thick necks. The detectives introduced themselves as Myers and Hansen. Myers wore a trim mustache so people could tell them apart. They bent to take a closer look at the body.
“It appears somebody came in through the balcony door,” Hector said. “Probably waiting here for him.”
“A broken neck?” Hansen said. “Don’t see that very often.”
“I assume,” Myers drawled, “that this place had already been tossed when you got here?”
“Yeah,” Pam said. “We think the victim might’ve been involved in that big
robbery at First State Bank. There’s not many places in an apartment this size where you could hide three million bucks, but someone checked pretty thoroughly.”
The thick-necked detectives exchanged a look.
Pam and Hector both said, “What?”
“Something we heard on the radio on the way over,” Hansen said. “Shots fired in midtown, off East Central. Nobody hit, so it’s none of our business, right? But the patrolmen checked the apartment occupied by one of the perps.”
“Yeah?”
“Ransacked,” Myers said. “Just like this.”
Mick watched his mirrors as he drove across town but saw no one trailing him except Bud, who followed in his white Equinox. Mick was distracted, remembering the murderous look on Linda’s face when she’d taken away the girls.
She and Bud had done the best they could to screen the girls from the blue tarp covering the bodies, but there was no hiding the pink smears that still decorated the tile floor. Those would require bleach and a mop and more time than Mick and Bud had to give them right then.
Linda hustled the girls out the front door to her waiting Volvo, Bud trailing behind, telling her to keep them at her mother’s until she heard from him. Mick waited in the doorway, watching this exchange, and Linda shot him a look, as if it were his fault these mutts had broken into her home, as if it were his fault that her husband had chosen a life of crime.
Hell, maybe that was the truth. If it weren’t for Bud’s long association with him, he probably would’ve knuckled under to the straight life by now. Still, Linda had known from the beginning how Bud made his money, and she’d willingly built a nice life around his income. To Mick, today’s objections seemed to come too late.
He checked the rearview as he stopped at an intersection, saw Bud right behind him, his mouth set in a straight line. Still stinging from Linda’s brusque, accusatory manner, same as he was. Funny how a woman could do that to them, when all the cops in the world couldn’t rattle them.
Mick thought Bud’s share of the loot might persuade Linda to forget the violence that had touched her home. A million bucks could buy a lot of fucking bleach.
He turned onto a washboard road that ran westward between decrepit mobile homes with sandy yards. Another mile and there was nothing but empty desert. Albuquerque had grown to encompass much of the West Mesa, covering its bare flanks with suburban sprawl, but the development hadn’t reached southwest of the city yet. This area was a dumping ground for trash and stolen cars. He wouldn’t be the first to torch some dead guys out here.
Mick glanced over his shoulder at the backseat, where the skinny gunman was
rolled up in the blue tarp, the ends twisted shut so it looked like the corn husk around a tamale. They’d had trouble folding the muscleman into the Charger’s small trunk, but they’d forced him to fit, then stuffed trash bags full of bloody paper towels in on top of him.
Once Bud got rid of that shot-up chair, cleaned the floors, and repaired a couple of bullet holes in the walls, the house would look normal again. Mick wondered whether that would be enough to make Linda happy, or whether she’d demand that they move. They’d have the money to buy a new place. With Linda’s real estate connections, it might even serve as a way to launder the cash.
He shook the thoughts out of his head. Those were Bud’s problems to solve, not his. He had plenty of his own troubles.
He couldn’t go back to his apartment, so everything he’d left there was lost forever. He had to torch his car, which meant he’d have to get new wheels. The feds were breathing down his neck. And there still was Vincent Caro, floating around out there somewhere. Mick felt sure he’d be seeing him again.
He checked his mirrors. Nothing behind him but Bud’s Equinox and the cloud of yellow dust stirred up by their cars. Maybe this was far enough. He braked and steered the Charger off the road, tires thumping off rocks. Broomweed scratched at the undercarriage as the car slowly lurched across the uneven ground. When he was thirty yards off the road, he killed the engine.
He climbed out, pausing a moment to take in the view of the rugged mountains soaring above the city. Out here he couldn’t even hear the hiss of distant traffic. Just the relentless desert wind.
Bud crunched toward him on foot, the Equinox already turned around on the gravel road, pointed back toward town. He carried a red two-gallon can of gasoline he’d bought for his lawn mower. He handed it over when he reached Mick, saying, “I’ll let you do the honors.”
Mick opened the trunk and splashed gas over the dead man curled up inside. He leaned through the open driver’s door and poured the rest onto the upholstery and the blue tarp. When the can was empty, he handed it to Bud, then dug in his pocket to come up with a book of matches, compliments of his motel.
Bud backed away as Mick struck one of the matches and used it to ignite the rest of the paper book. Once all the matches caught, it made a pretty big flame. He tossed it into the trunk.
The gasoline vapors ignited with a whoosh. Flames shot into the air. Right away, Mick got a whiff of burned meat, and he and Bud trotted away. By the time they reached Bud’s car, the interior of the Charger was engulfed, black smoke pouring out of shattered windows.
“Too bad,” Bud said as they climbed into the SUV. “That was a nice car.”
“Maybe I’ll buy another one just like it,” Mick said.
Bud put the Equinox into gear and sped along the rutted road.
“You could get a whole fleet of them with what we took off the bank.”
“Let’s go get that fucking money,” Mick said. “Right now.”
The local cops were on the sidewalk in the front of the one-story apartment building, mopping up, when Pam Willis and Hector Aragon arrived. The agents learned that the shots had been fired in the vacant lot across the street. Officers had found the brass from a .45-caliber pistol in the dusty lot. The apartment manager identified the shooter as Mick Wyman, who lived at number 6 in the tidy complex. No ID on the other guy, who’d apparently escaped injury by driving away in a hurry.
The computer turned up an armed robbery conviction on Wyman from twenty years ago. He’d apparently done his time and never been arrested since.
“Maybe he went straight,” Hector said.
“Or he got smarter,” Pam said. “So he didn’t get caught again.”
The manager was a silver-haired guy named Bob Fisher who was clearly annoyed at having to tell the story all over again.
“Can’t you get what you need from the local police?” he said. “I’ve got work to do.”
“You cleaning up Wyman’s apartment?” Pam asked.
Fisher shook his head. “Not yet. Thought I’d see if he came back to do it himself. We’ve got to replace a lot of stuff.”
“How bad is the mess?”
“Wasn’t enough that some asshole broke a window to get in, but he also sliced up all the furniture and urinated on the carpet. What kind of animal acts that way?”
The agents nodded understandingly, but Pam was ready with the next question.
“Think it was the guy in the car? Is that why Wyman was shooting at him?”
Fisher shook his head. “He wasn’t in the apartment long enough to make such a mess. I saw him go inside. Handsome guy in a nice-looking suit. Kinda old-fashioned looking, like a movie star or something. I went down to check on it. Knocked on the door but he wouldn’t answer. When I went back to my place to call Mr. Wyman, the guy slipped out and drove away. Few minutes later he was back, parked over there.”
“You told this to Wyman?”
“Yeah, on the phone. I didn’t know at the time that somebody had turned the
apartment upside down. Mr. Wyman said the guy was his cousin and he’d given him a key so he could spend the night.”
“You believed that?”
“Didn’t really have a chance to think about it. Once I told Mr. Wyman his cousin was parked over there, he said he’d take care of it. Few minutes later he showed up. They had words and the son of a bitch tried to run over Mr. Wyman.”
“What?”
“Didn’t they tell you that part? Wyman was walking away when the guy started the car and backed up real fast, trying to hit him. That’s when the shots were fired.”
“The car was damaged?”
Fisher nodded. “Back window and one of the side windows were smashed. I don’t know what else. Bet the rental company’s gonna be pissed.”
The agents exchanged a look.
“It was a rental?”
“I told the police I couldn’t be certain, but it had that look, you know? Brand new, but real plain looking. Blackwall tires.”
“You catch the make?”
“I think it was a Chevy,” he said, “but hell, all these new cars look alike to me.”
“Wyman’s was a Dodge?”
“One of those Chargers, dark blue. Helluva nice car. He and I talked about it one day while he was washing it out here in the parking lot. He said it had a lot of get-up-and-go.”
“Did he chase after the Chevy?”
“They went off in the same direction, but the other guy had a big head start.”
“You catch a license plate?”
“Nah. They sped away too fast.”
“You don’t keep the tenants’ plates on file?”
“Too much coming and going to keep them up-to-date. Some people trade cars every few months. I don’t understand it. I’ve been driving the same Buick for twelve years myself.”
Hector caught Pam’s eye and said, “We ought to get back to the office and check the car rental places.”
“I was thinking the same thing.”
“You don’t want to look inside the apartment?” Fisher asked. “I figured that’s
what was coming next.”
“No, that’s okay,” Pam said. “The locals already checked it out. They would’ve seen anything important.”
“Well, you’ll never see a bigger mess,” Fisher said. “Animals, I tell you. I don’t know what the world’s coming to.”
“People got no manners,” Pam said.
Fisher nodded, frowning in disgust.
“Here’s my card,” she said. “If your tenant shows up, can you give me a call?”
“I’m already supposed to call those other cops.”
“Sure,” she said. “But give us a heads-up, too, okay? We want to talk to Mick Wyman about another matter. In fact, let us know if
anyone
shows any interest in his place.”